Russian chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was one of the first to use color photography in the early 20th century in Russia.
In 1907, the photographer decided to systematically document the Russian Empire and was given a specially-equipped railroad car darkroom by Tsar Nicholas II for the project.
To create his images, he used an oblong glass plate through three different color filters of red, green, and blue, projecting them in slides on top of one another to create a full color image.
Today, more than 2,000 of his images are preserved by the Library of Congress. We’ve put together a collection of some of his most striking images.
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Prokudin-Gorskii took this photograph of Emir Said Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the last emir representative to rule the Emirate of Bukhara in Central Asia, in 1911.
Source: Library of Congress
Here, we get an early 20th-century view of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, which was previously known as Tiflis in Russian. Located on a plain formed by the Kura River, the city was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1801 before becoming the capital of an independent Georgia in 1991.
Source: Library of Congress, World Digital Library
By the time World War I arrived, Russia was in a stage of rapid industrialization. Prokudin-Gorskii was interested in documenting the economic life of the empire, capturing photographs like this one, taken in 1910, of a family mining-operation in the Ural Mountain region.
Source: Library of Congress
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